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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 20, 2025

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The I, Robot quote really gets a lot of mileage these days:

Can a robot write a accurate an accurate summary of sources?

Can a journalist?

Are LLMs really worse at combining sources unbiasedly and correctly, compared to the status quo, or just worse than the ideal? Gell-mann amnesia is so commonly experienced by anyone with particular expertise, that it has its own name.

From the "News Integrity in AI Assistants Report" pdf, page 62:

Based on this, we focused our evaluation on the consumer, free versions of the assistants, and used the default settings, including for model selection. [ChatGPT4o, Copilot Default, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Perplexity Default]

The report buries the lead here, their focus is on the most easily avaliable (when the experiment was conducted) models, without regards to it basically attacking a weakman. At least close to useful if one is interested how the masses interact with LLMs, but not for limits of even $20/month models.

With a 3% conversion rate to paid models, this is the entire point. If the free models were crap that nobody used, it would be one thing, but when Google is inserting these summaries into search results without anyone asking for it, this is what AI is. Period. Nobody cares about the accuracy of models that no one uses.

Are LLMs really worse at combining sources unbiasedly and correctly, compared to the status quo, or just worse than the ideal?

All journalists deserve the woodchipper, but still if they want to they can summarize an article without majorly fucking up nearly half the time.

The report buries the lead here, their focus is on the most easily available models

At least for how it affects the culture war, most of the people slinging slop on the internet and social media are doing it with the free experience. I use the free experience as well - personally I use grokslop free since slopgpt went to shit with gpt5.